navyblue
01-19-2003, 02:38 PM
From the Boston Globe 01/19/03:
It is clear that the president gave more thought to the conflict between militant Islam and the West than his father ever did when he was president. The George Bushes? No, the John Adamses.
The year was 1829, and John Quincy Adams was preoccupied with the Greek revolt against the Ottoman Empire that had raged for most of the decade. As Richard Samuelson explains in the new Claremont Review, Adams foresaw that the war for Greek independence was just the start of what would be a prolonged clash of civilizations. In an essay written shortly after he left the White House, Adams predicted that the Christian West, with its Enlightenment ideals of liberty, tolerance, and progress, would always be at daggers drawn with the Islamic East and its drive to bring the world under Koranic law.
It dismayed the former president that European elites were blind to the real stakes in the fight over Greece. The Ottomans, by contrast, understood exactly what they were fighting for. Adams quoted the Sultan: ''This is not like former contests, a political war for provinces and frontiers.... This war must be considered purely a religious war and a national war.'' Muslims must fight the infidels wherever they found them, the Sultan decreed, for West and East were now in a struggle for supremacy.
The war we are in is an old one. * It didn't begin with Osama bin Laden.
It is clear that the president gave more thought to the conflict between militant Islam and the West than his father ever did when he was president. The George Bushes? No, the John Adamses.
The year was 1829, and John Quincy Adams was preoccupied with the Greek revolt against the Ottoman Empire that had raged for most of the decade. As Richard Samuelson explains in the new Claremont Review, Adams foresaw that the war for Greek independence was just the start of what would be a prolonged clash of civilizations. In an essay written shortly after he left the White House, Adams predicted that the Christian West, with its Enlightenment ideals of liberty, tolerance, and progress, would always be at daggers drawn with the Islamic East and its drive to bring the world under Koranic law.
It dismayed the former president that European elites were blind to the real stakes in the fight over Greece. The Ottomans, by contrast, understood exactly what they were fighting for. Adams quoted the Sultan: ''This is not like former contests, a political war for provinces and frontiers.... This war must be considered purely a religious war and a national war.'' Muslims must fight the infidels wherever they found them, the Sultan decreed, for West and East were now in a struggle for supremacy.
The war we are in is an old one. * It didn't begin with Osama bin Laden.